Remembering the BlackBerry 850 – the first ever RIM BlackBerry device
Before BlackBerry phones with tiny little keys arrived, there was the BlackBerry 850 proto-phone, also with tiny little keys
Ah, here we go: a classic piece of gear that meant business. In every sense, because the BlackBerry 850’s tiny display was just about good enough for icons, menus and a few lines of text. But not games. Because fun was banned on BlackBerry devices.
Yeah, but at least it had a proper keyboard, unlike your newfangled smartphones.
And that was a big deal at the time. The BlackBerry 850 was tiny, yet had all the keys you needed to rapidly smash out messages – even if you did sometimes wish you could file your fingers down to points. Still, that was better than mashing numbers on a Nokia until it revealed the right letter, or braving its terrifying autocorrect system. In fact, the BlackBerry 850 even excelled there: you could quickly craft custom entries, for example to expand ‘mon’ to ‘Monday’.
Just as well. Business sorts don’t have time to waste on typing extra letters, you know.
Which is probably why they gravitated to what was, in reality, a souped-up pager. It was all they needed to organise their day, squeezed into a palm-sized device that was always on and always connected. They could manage tasks, peruse calendars, write memos saying things like ‘make money’ and ‘make even more money’, use the calculator to tot up their money, and set an alarm to get up early and make yet more money tomorrow. Mostly, though, it became synonymous with email, to the point that fans wouldn’t shut up about it.
Actually, I’m still using a BlackBerry as my daily driver for email.
That explains… so much. But you might have noticed no one else is. At the time, a core following was into business devices to do business things, but most people weren’t. For a while that worked for RIM, which made bigger and better BlackBerry devices; then the iPhone arrived with no keys at all and broke the company’s brain. Years later, it capitulated with the touchscreen-based BlackBerry Storm. Needless to say, the company got quite a few angry emails about that – all typed out on tiny keys.
Craig Grannell
Contributor 
